Historian seeks help in identifying boy photographed in Freedom in 1940

Marsha Keefer

Sunday

Jan 6, 2019 at 9:00 AM

For the past 13 years, Joe Manning, a retired social worker and historian from Northampton, Mass., has viewed photos taken in the Depression years to document American life and now part of a Library of Congress collection to find out what happened to the people profiled and their descendants.

Images grip the heart, sear the psyche.

Stark black-and-white photographs document American life in the Depression years — poor migrant workers; hungry children, heads buried in their mother’s shoulders, huddled in a lean-to tent; a farmer and his two young boys caught in a dust storm in Oklahoma. And an unidentified boy who climbs a snowy hillside in Freedom.

The pictures, part of a vast portfolio of close to 195,000 taken from 1935 to 1944 for the Farm Security Administration to illustrate and combat rural poverty, are now part of the Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Online Catalog.

Though compelling, the photographs give but a glimpse of their subjects’ — many anonymous — circumstances.

Joe Manning delves deeper, and wants to know more.

For the past 13 years, the retired social worker and historian from Northampton, Mass., has viewed these pictures — what he calls a “treasure chest of unfinished stories” — and those of photographer Lewis Hine, who documented child labor in the early 1900s, to find out what happened to the people profiled and their descendants.

“You have to think that in 99.9 percent of these photographs there would have been no reason ever to take them other than the fact the government was taking them,” said Manning. “Nobody was taking pictures like this of the general population.”

He’s researched and written life stories of almost 350 children from the Hine project and 25 people from FSA files.

It’s not a money maker, however.

“I never charge anybody for anything,” he said. “I do it because I think it’s a great thing to do.”

He gives subjects, especially children, “some dignity. In a sense, I’m telling people these aren’t just cute pictures, but really important, and these people were important.”

So, too, is the boy from Freedom. Manning’s researching his story now and needs Beaver County’s help. He’s hoping someone may recognize the boy and location or know relatives or friends he can contact.

We do know this: Jack Delano, one of 11 photographers hired by the FSA to travel the country to compile a pictorial record of American life in support of President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal programs, took the boy’s picture in January 1940.

Manning estimates he’s 8 or 9 years old and could still be alive.

In the photograph, the child, dressed in winter clothing, stands on a slope between two frame houses overlooking a commercial corridor.

“First of all, I see this incredible smile on the boy,” Manning said. “He’s so giving to the camera.”

Manning admires the way Delano “placed him in the scene. It’s interesting that he’s looking down at the child, down a hill, down a slope. The kid’s face is so well illuminated.”

Manning likes the photo’s composition, too, capturing the “feeling” of western Pennsylvania. He points out the “deep valley and you see the mill in the background or whatever it is.”

You can almost reach out and touch the wood and stone, he said. One of Delano’s skills, Manning said, was focusing on landscapes and streetscapes.

His juxtaposition of the smiling boy in a stark, dismal environment “makes the picture much more human,” Manning said.

He came across the boy’s picture the week before last and called it a “wonderful picture, incredible.” It tugged at him. Pictures that make one feel emotional or of “faces you remember forever,” he said, are ones he pursues.

Manning employs detective skills to find subjects.

If he has a name, he uses the same tools historians, particularly genealogists, use such as Ancestry.com and newspaper archives. The key, however, is to find living descendants since chances are the subject is no longer living.

A death record yields when and where a person died, enabling Manning to contact the local library to request a copy of an obituary. That provides survivors’ names.

It’s a lot of work and time, he said, but “fun to do. Kind of like being a detective.”

When the subject is not identified, such as the case with the Freedom boy, it’s more difficult.

So, he reaches out to the local newspaper and asks the editor to publish the picture hoping someone will recognize the subject.

The first time he approached a newspaper for help was in 2007, after seeing a picture Hine shot of a young girl who worked in a cotton mill in South Carolina in the early 1900s.

“She didn’t have a name,” Manning said. All he had was a time, place and photo.

He called the editor of the paper in Lancaster, S.C., and convinced him to run the picture to see if anyone recognized it.

The day after the photo published, he received a call from the woman’s daughter.

She told him she picked up her newspaper, sat at the kitchen table with a cup of coffee, and staring back at her on the front page was her mother.

“She started to cry,” Manning said, who admitted the story “still chokes me up sometimes.”

The woman knew her mother worked in the cotton mill, but “never thought she’d see a picture of her doing it,” Manning said. “She worshiped her mother so much.”

That photo “brought back so many memories of her mother.”

Since then, this method, he said, has worked “about a dozen times,” and he hopes it will work in tracking the Freedom boy or his family. He asks anyone with information to contact him at 575 Bridge Road, Unit 9-1, Florence, MA 01062, or email him at manningfamily@rcn.com.

He publishes these stories on his website, Mornings on Maple Street, accessed at www.morningsonmaplestreet.com.

Manning said his best story resulted from a photo he saw on the Library of Congress website in early December 2007.

“I must have stared at it for five minutes. I thought it was one of the most beautiful pictures I had ever seen,” he wrote on his website.

FSA photographer John Vachon took a picture of an unnamed farm girl in Seward County, Nebraska, in 1938.

Clad in a plain, dotted dress, she sat on the ground next to a dirt road, waiting for a school bus, Manning said. The photograph reminded him of Andrew Wyeth’s iconic painting, “Christina’s World.”

Again, he talked to the editor at the Seward County Independent who agreed to print the photo.

“I found out who she was,” Manning said, after receiving an email from the family who saw the picture in the newspaper.

The girl in the photo was Claudine Abele, still living in Seward County at age 79.

“I interviewed her,” Manning said, for more than an hour. “It was surreal.”

Abele didn’t remember being photographed, but did remember wearing the dress.

“I started out this project with no idea it would grow into what it’s grown into,” said Manning.

Never miss a story

Choose the plan that's right for you.
Digital access or digital and print delivery.